1.2m new voters added to electoral roll

The Electoral Commission says a total of about 1.2million new voters were registered under the limited voter registration exercise which ended last week.

Out of that number, the registration of 8,500 new voters were challenged.

According to the commission, the 1.2million figure was provisional since it was still checking the actual figure with the Voter Management System (VMS) to delete multiple registrations.

In an interview with Radio Ghana in Kumasi, the Director of Electoral Services, Dr Serebour Quaicoe said the commission had initially projected to register about 700,000 but ended up with 1.2million.

“But I say it's a provisional figure because we are now checking on the machine itself, we always have to use pen drive to take the data from the system into the VMS [Voter Management System], so we want to be sure that we have captured everybody who registered... so that we come out with the actual figure," Dr Quaicoe explained.

"The law states that your name should appear only once on the register but when we started exporting the figures into the database, there is a high rate of multiple registrations," he said.

He said the Ashanti Region registered the highest number of 209,810 new voters followed by the Greater Accra, then Eastern and Central regions.

"This year the challenge system was very very low, maybe we are understanding ourselves because some of the challenges are just flimsy. The person will just look at your face and say you are not a Ghanaian, you are under age and the rest. But when they appeared before the committee, we realised that the challenge had no basis," Dr Quaicoe said.

On the creation of new constituencies, Dr Quaicoe explained that the constitution provides that seven years after the previous demarcation of constituencies, the commission can revise or after the publication of census results.

"There has been a lot of applications for the creation of new constituencies but for now the commission has not taken a decision to either create or not to create," he said.